You may think visitors move through your goal funnel exactly the way you set it up in Google Analytics. Unfortunately even after you take care to avoid the most common funnel issues, surprises (sometimes hidden) may appear (or lurk) in your data.

Check out the Goal Flow report to bring more details into view. Chances are you’ll see visitors doing things like skipping steps and looping back to previous steps – things you just can’t see in the standard Funnel Visualization report.

I pulled some example funnel data to show how these two reports relate to each other. Let’s review a couple quick points about funnels to see where funny-looking data may appear.

Where funnel numbers come from

Looking at the Funnel Visualization report, you may wonder: How did a visitor get from A to B? What do the numbers on each step really mean?

First, you should know that each step displays the number of visits for that step, not the number of pageviews. If you want to match the number to your Content reports, look at unique pageviews. Google Analytics defines unique pageviews as “the number of visits during which the specified page is viewed at least once”. Thinking of “visits that touched this step” is one way to keep it straight.

While the number of “visits that touched this step” is true for the first step and last step (the destination URL) in the funnel, it isn’t necessarily true for the intermediate steps of the funnel. The Funnel Visualization report will backfill between steps, counting visits for a step that was not touched as long as a previous and subsequent step was touched in those visits.

Backfill (or a goal setup error, or both) may explain why the same numbers appear between two or more steps, as in the example shown here. When that’s the case, you’ll also see “0 exits” on the right side of the funnel. Assuming you have a reasonable amount of data, not just a couple of visits, you should instead see at least a few exits at every step of the funnel.

In this example the funny-looking data that draws my eye is the “0 exits” next to step 2. It’s very unlikely that all 17 visits going from step 1 (registration page) to step 2 (login page) also passed right through to step 3 (order page) without any exits. I’ve checked my goal setup and it’s fine, so what’s going on there?

Goal flow fills in the missing details

Even if you don’t have any funny-looking data in the Funnel Visualization report, the Goal Flow report will reveal details that may surprise you. The standard funnel diagram can hide skipped steps with backfilling, and simply has no way to represent loops through steps. Its limited format forces it to compress the wide variety of visitor paths into a narrow one-directional view.

In comparison, the goal flow diagram represents visitor paths more accurately in several ways:

flexible format for visuals you can understand intuitively

pageview numbers in the nodes, in addition to visit numbers in the first column and in the table

drill into the data by segmenting, highlighting, and clicking for node details

Let’s see how much more is revealed in my example funnel data by switching to the Goal Flow report. Find the report link in the interface right below the Funnel Visualization link in the left navigation, under Conversions > Goals.

In the goal flow diagram above (click the image for a larger view), it’s immediately obvious that no visits touched the login step because the flow omits the login step and has just 3 nodes instead of 4. The 3 green nodes cover only the steps that visits actually touched: registration, order, and purchase completed. Since I’ve already checked my goal setup, I know the login node isn’t missing for other reasons.

Intuitive visual elements include not only the number of nodes, but also:

the size of the nodes and connectors, which relate to the amount of traffic flowing through them

the color red for traffic leaving the funnel

the connections, which skip intermediate nodes and also loop back to earlier nodes

In the closeup below, I’ve highlighted the connection that loops back from the order step to the registration step. You can also see the lighter gray (not highlighted) connections for funnel traffic that skips the registration step and starts on the order step.

Importantly, the goal flow diagram lets me see what’s happening page by page, in contrast to the funnel diagram which focuses on visit level data only.

Pageview numbers shown in the nodes above represent:

376 total pageviews for the registration page

9 total pageviews for the registration page when part of the highlighted loop

38 total pageviews for the order page

8 total pageviews for the order page when part of the highlighted loop

5 “pageviews” = 5 repetitions of the loop from order page back to registration

What else can we learn?

Let’s put pageviews in context with the number of visits for a even more complete picture.

Visit numbers shown in the first column represent:

169 visits to the funnel from services.google.com

1 visit from services.google.com included the highlighted loop

52 visits to the funnel from direct traffic

3 visits from direct traffic included the highlighted loop

In other words, 4 visits accounted for 5 loops from order back to registration, so 1 of those visits actually did the loop twice! Here’s the true path of those visits, impossible to see in the standard funnel report:

Notice that the visit that does the loop twice ends up exiting from the register step. The goal flow diagram assigns this to the red exit flow on the node for the registration page, but the standard funnel will assign the exit to the order page. The standard funnel considers the exit to be the farthest funnel step reached, and disregards the actual order of steps in order to simplify the funnel path representation.

We could discover similar insights by examining other loops in the goal flow. Entrances can be misrepresented for the same reason that apply to exits – the standard funnel disregards the order of steps. Multiple loops around certain steps can reveal user frustration, or perhaps a typical shopping behavior, depending on the conversion and type of site you have.

And don’t forget to dig further with custom segments or even just by editing the dimension shown in the first column.

By digging into the Goal Flow report, you can find more ways your visitors get hung up in the conversion path, and truer indications of where they enter and exit, compared to the standard Funnel Visualization report.

What insights have you discovered in your goal flow data? Is any of your funnel data particularly vexing? Do you still prefer the standard funnel report for specific use cases? Please share in the comments.

Dorcas Alexander is a Digital Analyst working with Google Analytics. Her path to LunaMetrics included stints in ad agency creative, math, computer science, language technology research, and corporate training. She loves to learn and teach what she’s learned. One of the top-rated tournament Scrabble players in Pennsylvania, Dorcas has an insatiable drive to compete and win. “Impossible” is not in her vocabulary.

Hello! Really great post! I’m finally beginning to understand this part of Analytics. But I still have some questions. About the “…” what does it mean? And can I expand the Visits by source number? I mean, it only shows the top 5, sometimes I need more than 5, is there a way to do it?

Hi Robson, The “…” at the bottom of the first column and at the bottom of the table is the sum of everything else beyond the top 5 sources (or whatever dimension you choose to show in the first column). You can get more information about what is included in “…” by clicking on that node at the bottom of the first column and choosing “Group Details”. In the Group Details box, change “Outgoing traffic” to “Top segments” and you’ll see source #6, #7, #8, etc. If you want to see one or more of those segments in the goal flow, choose the gear icon at the top of the first column. This will give you a “Customize Dimension Items” box where you can define 1, 2, 3, 4, or 5 segments. For example, if I saw in Group Details that “…” included visits from Facebook and Twitter, and I wanted to see how those visitors moved through the goal flow, I could use the gear icon to define those 2 segments. I’d click “+Add an item” twice and fill in the details for each segment. So you can’t get more than 5 segments at a time, but you can define which 5 segments you see.

Excellent article but I was wondering what would happen in the following scenario: a person visits the registration page, submits theinformation and encounters an error (causing the registration page to reload) but then fixes the problem and successfully submits an order? Will the outcome be: 1- A visit to the right of the registration page (in red)
2- A visit to the purchase completed step?

Hi Mario, In the standard funnel report (not goal flow), it does not matter what pages come in between the funnel steps. If a visit contains any two steps, GA displays a path through those steps without any exits. In your scenario, the outcome will be #2.

Hi Meghan, In the funnel visualization reports, each step displays the number of visits for that step. There is no metric in GA called “unique visits”… perhaps you were wondering about “unique visitors”? In GA, goals are a visit-based metric, i.e. counted once per visit. That’s why these reports display the number of visits, not visitors.

Help! I am seeing something I can’t explain in our funnel visualization report for newsletter registration. There are a number of views of the registration form (www,physiciansweekly.com/newsletter-signup) that leap directly to either the “Thank You” page (which is displayed only after the form is submitted) and to the confirmation page (which is displayed only after the subscriber clicks on a confirmation link in an e-mail.) Can you shed any light on what might be happening here?

Hi Sally, It sounds like your site may show some visitors a thank-you page or a confirmation page more than once. Perhaps your site shows these pages based on a user-state (e.g. “registered” or “confirmed”). Check with your developers to see how those pages work. Also compare the number of confirmations in GA to the number of actual subscribers in your newsletter mailing list.

I’m seeing completely different data between my funnel and goal flow ie. 805 visits in flow starting vs 1409 in funnel vis. Are they due to match (or at least be closer!) than that? Completions of both had the funnel vis. at double of the goal flow.

Hi Ally, I’m not sure why you would be seeing that large a difference, unless you accidentally were looking at different goals? Another thing that would affect the numbers is the sampling that might be occurring in the goal flow report, but I wouldn’t expect it to be off by so much. If your goal flow report is based on sampled data (a common occurrence), a yellow bar at the top right will tell you what size the data sample was. If the data sample was very small, e.g. 2% of your data, that could explain a large difference between goal flow and funnel visualization. Funnel Visualization is not based on sampled data.

In between each of my steps in my visitor flow it shows that people are visiting a page that is sort of non existent. (/face-to-face.html) That url is a part of an “application” but I do not believe that people are actually clicking on this.It shows like they are visiting this page in between every step so it makes my conversion funnel look like people are leaving the funnel. Why does it show up in between each step in my analytic report?

Hi Ben, Google Analytics presents each page hit in order by the time stamp on the hit. So if the GA code on your site is sending a page hit for a “non-existent” page in between hits for other “real” pages, then that is what the visitor flow report will show.

My GA goal flow has an error that says that I may have advanced segments or a date range for which there is no data. I have try to change the date range and I have no advanced segments right now. I know there is data to display for this goal. Any ideas?

Goal flow is one of the reports in GA that is calculated “on the fly” i.e. at the time you request it. That means it may try to look through a sample of your data instead of looking through all your data, in order to build the flow diagram. When it looks through a sample, it may not find the goal data and then it will display the message you saw. To get around this, try to find the smallest date range where you are certain the goal completion(s) occurred. This will give GA a better chance of finding your goal completions, because it will reduce the size of the dataset which will reduce or eliminate the chance of sampling.